You've heard of strange bedfellows, but have you
noticed just how strange the bedfellow situation is becoming in the 2004
Presidential campaign? The alliances get "curiouser and curiouser,"
to quote the author Lewis Carroll, whose proto-psychedelic creation, "Alice
in Wonderland," managed to prefigure the surreal aspect of the current
political campaign.

Forget the fact that George W. Bush and John Kerry are
lobbing broadsides in the form of multi-million-dollar TV advertising
salvoes at each other in the "battleground" states. No, the
more involving aspect of the 2004 political campaign season can be found
bubbling just beneath the surface, in the feints and jabs being exchanged
among the has-beens, the no-longer-relevants, the contemporary political
equivalents of doo-wop groups after the Beatles and the subsequent "British
Invasion" took American popular music by storm in the 1960s.

We know that the Bush-Kerry dogfight is going to be decided
with a high degree of finality in early November of this year. What we
don't know — and may never know, which adds to the intrigue —
is what effect the eerily dreamlike off-camera turf wars among the I-coulda-been-a-contender
crowd (to acknowledge Marlon Brando's passing) might exert on the main
event. I'm talking about the influence of the Ralph Naders, the Al Gores,
the John McCains, the Howard Deans, even the Wesley Clarks, on the outcome
of the main event. Because — take it to the bank — none of
these wannabe has-beens shows any sign of relinquishing whatever modest
claim to the national political spotlight he may have salvaged after being
roundly booed off the electronic equivalent of the national political
stage.

Among the latest headlines to trumpet the fact that we're
not in Kansas any more was this AOL announcement: Nader and Dean Will
Debate. Uh, sure. Of course. Nader and Dean. Are we talking about the
Ralph Nader who can't even claim the endorsement of the radical environmentalist
Green Party, which rejected him in favor of Texas attorney David Cobb,
thus seriously diminishing Nader's chances of appearing on Presidential
ballots in such key states as Wisconsin and California? Are we referring
to the Howard Dean whose stock has sunk to a level below that of his patronymic
namesake John Dean, except that Howard Dean has never actually done anything
remotely as important as the long-irrelevant John Dean did? (To say nothing
of the fact that Howard's wife, Judy — blogger Dan O'Leary's uncharitable
headline: "Hey, Judy, Mr. Ed Wants His Smile Back" — defies
comparison with John's cool and beautiful and mysterious and apparently
devoted Maureen.)

It's not about the candidates' wives, you say? OK, I'll
give you that. Maybe. But remember, we're not really talking about candidates
here. We're talking about people who have demonstrated that they don't
have what it takes to compete at the highest level for the biggest prize.
Which means that we're talking about people who have an axe to grind,
a bone to pick. We're talking about people who likely (though not understandably)
have foresworn working in their party's best interests in favor of carving
out a chunk of turf for themselves. The second-raters will do pretty much
anything to grab a few news cycles worth of exposure, especially if the
coverage they generate creates the impression that they're still players.
There's the operative word: Player.

Everything is in play, and if you can commandeer and manage
to elevate to newsworthy status an event over which you exert some control,
well, you're a player. Al Gore has tried unsuccessfully to pick a possible
winner he can gravy-train, but, having failed miserably by very conspicuously
coming out for Dean just before Dean melted down, Gore has more recently
chosen to employ the tactic of delivering the occasional fire-and-brimstone
speech to a group or organization which traditionally receives national
media attention in order to reassert his status as a player. The most
recent example of this was his address a little over a week ago at the
Georgetown University Law Center, in which he, borrowing facts and rhetoric
from Michael Moore's "Farenheit 9/11," and demonstrating a command
of his thought processes that would do a schizophrenic proud, lashed out
at Bush for lying about the reasons we invaded Iraq. Ho hum.

The point of the preceding rant is, of course, that the
Left is not only building its house upon sand — and thus virtually
assuring that it will come crashing down, and sooner rather than later
— it's building its house out of the flimsiest of materials. The
"Alice in Wonderland" analogy holds, across the board. After
she passes through the looking-glass, the Alice of Lewis Carroll's creation
encounters a world which makes no sense to an intelligent person possessed
of even a modicum of common sense. The description of what's occurring
in the world today that we get from the mainstream media and the Democrats
and John Kerry bears no more relation to what's really going on than does
the surreal world Alice encountered to the solid Victorian understanding
of how things worked against which Carroll's protagonist measured her
experiences.

To the John Kerrys and the Al Gores and the Howard Deans
and the Ralph Naders who snatch feverishly at precious airtime (and, by
extension, faux legitimacy), we can only look with a measure of self-satisfied
smugness. With this look we communicate to them our certainty that their
unnervingly unhinged vision of the meaning of the struggle that is taking
place in the world today for the very souls of the people of this planet
is not only misguided, it is a ticket to the oblivion of the inhuman and
totalitarian sensibility that would assume dominance in the wake of America's
likely abdication, under Democrat Party control, of its role as the bastion
of democratic values in the world today.